"Radical Evil": Religious, Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Responses

Terrorism, war, genocide, sexual abuse, murder: how can the human mind make sense of these horrors without reducing them to the 'obscenity of understanding', of trying to imagine the unimaginable? How can we possibly try to imagine the mind of perpetrators of violence, sexual abuse and terror? Yet these phenomena are becoming more pervasive and immediate and the destruction of human bodies and minds is worsening. How is it possible to sustain hope and faith in human goodness when our capacity for evil grows more sinister and ingenious? We will explore these and other questions comparatively and cross-culturally, examining the perspectives of religious, philosophical and psychoanalytic thinkers who represent Western and non-Western cultural and religious traditions.